Do patient satisfaction and health improvement affect sustainability of voluntary co-location clusters? Evidence from Vietnam

Background: Over the past 15 years or so the phenomenon of voluntarily co-located patients communities has been emerging. Patients, especially the poor, have chosen to live together, seeking/lending supports from/to one another. Nonetheless, despite the existence of these communities, little is researched or known about how those co-located patients as main subjects of the clusters perceive the value they receive and see their future connection to the communities they are, or were, living in. Answering these questions helps us to better understand the prospect of those community, in terms of sustainability.Methods: The study employs the method of categorical data analysis, specifically multiple logistic regressions, to investigate relationships between groups of factors such as perceived degrees of satisfaction with financial means provided by the communities, and reported health improvements (predictor variables), and patients' short- and longer-term commitments to these communities (response variable).Results: All groups of factors, and variables entering the analytical models, have shown statistical significance upon successful estimations based on the provided empirical data sets. The results suggest two meaningful empirical relationships following the data modeling efforts: 1) between financial stress facing patients and the financial benefits they received from the community, and their propensity to stay connected to it; and 2) between general level of satisfaction, health improvements, and patients' long-term commitment to these communities. Overall all, financial benefits and health improvements are found to influence a significant increase in probabilities for patients to become committed to their communities in the short and long term, respectively.Conclusions: This study is to inform policy makers and social workers in healthcare sector about the realities that patients choose to stick to the co-location clusters have an economic reason: finding means to fight their financial hardship. This may suggest a higher degree of complication in dealing with social matters for poor patients than many previously thought of. The issue of suitable income-generating jobs for patient may probably be ignored by the majority of the public by only focusing on charity programs a0nd giving in-kind donations (which turn out to be not very useful). With respect to social policies, it is noteworthy that patients are not those who seek to ask for supports but can potentially be the donors as suggested by the evidence found that the probability of staying committed to the community increase upon completion of medical treatments, seeing health conditions improve.